King Kon

What is going on with the weird literary/publishing business, beyond the surface?

They always seem to have to promote books and authors with hyperbole, lies and deception. Also, it appears that most if not all “big-name” authors come from prominent and/or wealthy backgrounds.

Stieg Larsson

This author is well-known for his Millennium series of books, better known as the series introduced with, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Saying those books are any good is borderline daft.

Just like the other heavily promoted garbage we’ve looked at (e.g.: Citizen Kane), it’s demonstrably bad. It’s really true that a book doesn’t need any quality as long as it serves as propaganda. You’ve never seen such piffle, chosen for out-sized promotion mainly because it serves the PC and “misogynist men” agendas.

Oh My Goodness

It’s a sad truth, but, even knowing that many people can’t distinguish truth from fiction, and knowing how easily fooled and manipulated many (most?) people are, it was still a bit of a shock to read this comment:

The first half of the book was very difficult to get through because of the pace but I didn’t let that hold me back. I am one of those weirdo’s that is compelled to finish a book even if I get sick from it. Now to preface this I must also add that I am very sensitive to violence. I was very disturbed and my poor husband was clueless as to why I didn’t want to get close to him from all the negative male characters in the book.

I finished it and I wish I never picked it up because it was too much for me to handle. I did skip some pages because I was feeling sick from some parts but I liked the main character until she slept with the detective. It had a lot of action going on in the last half of the book and I was rooting so hard for Lisbeth, but I won’t do that again.

— “Char,” commenting on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, on goodreads.com

One wonders, though, if she’s ever repelled by females due to fictional depictions of negative women in books?

Well, Larsson (now deceased, and another one that changed his name) and his family were big-time commies, of course.

Fortunately, you don’t have to read the crap yourself, since there’s an excellent “review” here.

They don’t just set up a big publishing house, invest millions, then sit around and wait for Salinger the Second to produce Catcher in the Rye II, or To Kill a Mockingbird, the Sequel, or something. “Dum-de-dum, guess I’ll lounge here and twiddle my thumbs until someone comes along. No worries about overhead or anything like that.”

Movie studios exist to make movies; publishers, to publish books. They aren’t in the business of publishing Aunt Petunia’s 101 Sangria Recipes, or teens’ books of poetry. They print what they know will sell. Or, what they choose to promote, using every trick they can muster.

A blogger mentioned how the monopoly of the publishers has been broken, and the average slob can now publish. Not quite. We’re still beholden to the needs of publicity and distribution. So it’s a pipe-dream to think a nobody can expect any degree of success. How do you compete with the hype machine?

King

Then there’s King. One used to see this phrasing in old writing: “A most extraordinary finding,” or “a most singular discovery.” And that’s what we have when we investigate Stephen King, and smell the same thing we have smelled so many times before: the stank of deception.

A favorite author of mine, for years, was Stephen Edwin King, who could be described as a modern-day Shakespeare. Most of those criticizing King haven’t actually read him, perhaps just watched the movies and scanned critiques of others so they could jump in mouth-first to vent mindlessly.

King, or whoever it is, should in fact be more renowned for his work, in the “literary world,” and the critics are strangely silent about the beauty of some of his prose, or how evocative, moving and well-structured it usually is.

Yes, some of King’s stuff is quite beautiful, like, The Reach from his Skeleton Crew collection.

But you’d never know it from King’s own words. He has this peculiar way of referencing his own writing, for example, saying that The Tommyknockers was “awful,” Needful Things, “wasn’t very good.” (Actually, it was not his best, but it was just fine, philosophical, insightful and a nice allegory. Any brick like that — his usual lengthy style — that can hold your interest for 944 pages has to be at least somewhat good.)

Who trashes his own stuff like this? False modesty?

What wasn’t very good, off the top of the head: Rose Madder, a weird feminist diatribe. And Duma Key, a pointless endeavor which ends with his tiresome trope of having spooks flying willy-nilly out of a disintegrating building.

What also isn’t very good, is how he turned into a typical liberal flake/punk, and a “woke” ass’s hole.

For example, his take on guns. He is a fake “realist,” who says he doesn’t want to ban guns, merely have sensible restrictions (while admitting he owns his own guns and has armed bodyguards). Typical liberal/Hollywood-style behavior.

The photo was made by a fellow student Frank Kadi, who over the years has turned down many offers for the rights to it. It was published as the front page of the Maine Campus student newspaper at the university of Maine at Orono (UMO back then, now called UMaine), It was during finals week and was designed to give students a little encouragement to study for finals lest some horrible fate befall them. He really is holding a double-barrel shotgun.

Another of King’s quirks is always saying how a certain book of his isn’t like his usual writing. Shawshank, The Gunslinger...

An old woman confronted him in the supermarket, saying he didn’t write The Shawshank Redemption.

King said something on the lines of, “It was very strange. It wasn’t really very much like my other stuff — maybe I didn’t write it!” This is a little game they play, obliquely admitting to something, in a sly or defiant tone. It’s similar to when they broadly hint at, or outright reveal, political corruption, again as if to say, “What are you going to do about it?”

Then there is something unforgivable. King appears to have turned into a notorious mole and revolutionary, aligned with all the destructive notions commie philosophy can provide. Consider the damage that subtle, hidden messages do. He has a story, about a man who kills his wife. Anyway, in the story there’s a major crisis when his son gets the neighbor girl pregnant and there’s all kinds of hellfire and brimstone over that, which is, of course, purely nuts. It's scummy behavior to propagate a myth like that, about “disastrous teenage pregnancy,” when most pregnancies should be teenage ones. As explained previously, we live in a twisted world where parenting is senselessly delayed, which goes against nature and has had obvious, far-reaching deleterious effect. Don’t think it isn’t intentional that King had to make the reaction of the families so hysterical. Instead, and what would have made for a much better story, is if one of the parents goes wacky, and another explains that they are farming folk, and a newcomer is a wonderful boon for them, thereby assuaging the outrage.

Others have mentioned some very questionable antics in his personal life. It seems talent is no indicator of what kind of person someone is.

A reported dope-addicted lush, how could he be so productive, at such routinely high quality...? Could it be that King was just a metaphorical surfer, skimming the point break of perfected talent on his synthetic highs, which propelled him to the heights? Let’s see what thoughtlab.com, one of the only places giving a clear, unobfuscated answer about drug use and creativity, says.

Simply put, although creative people are more inclined toward substance abuse, there is no evidence of even a causal connection between drug use and creativity.

The reality is that addiction or dependence on substances can actually stifle creativity.

So, as a drug addict, it would seem impossible for him to have been so prolific while maintaining consistent high quality. The eight-novel (plus novella and children’s book) Dark Tower series had an ending that was disappointing to some, but overall the series was excellent. An extended series of books by a dope fiend would be lousy and riddled with errors (in the unlikely event that a dope fiend could actually complete such a monumental task).

King being a drunk and addict also helps reinforce their disruptive, “it’s cool to be a drunk junkie” theme, employed to help keep the population in a stupor.

Then There’s This

So, King, a guy that has no discipline to run his own life properly, has the discipline to work productively, endlessly, through every morning, every day? He supposedly writes like 10 pages per day. Sure, Junkie, sure. How the hell do you do that when you’re not just troubled by addictions, but, like everyone else, have other commitments, chores and tasks?

King said, to aspiring authors, “a page a day and you have a novel at the end of the year.” No serious writer could mean that. A novel requires research, editing, revisions and meticulous care. Often, you get a lot of work done — and then it has to be thrown out because it’s no good, or it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the story or has continuity and other errors, and on and on.

In fact, “King had thrown an early draft of the novel into the trash after becoming discouraged with his progress writing about a teenage girl with psychic powers.”

Where do all the ideas come from, when he said he was dry after Carrie? (Which is to say, he admits going dry at least sometimes.) So, then, how are you going to be inspired every single subsequent day of your life? (Not to mention the effort in research for your story then keeping it consistent, logical and flowing, which is another huge process they don’t talk about.)

Here’s the thing: a writer is plenty occupied reading and re-reading his own stuff, maybe a hundred times or more. Working on a book is time-consuming, entailing several revisions. Meaning you have to edit the damn thing several times, then re-read again for each edit. There’s no time for other buggering about, but this dude is flitting around all over the place. Ridiculous. It would try the energies and capabilities of the most extreme obsessive-compulsive. Even if he wasn’t otherwise occupied, just gallivanting all over hell’s half acre the way he does would consume his day. So much idle time is another anomalous data point that indicates the story’s off, making it appear that he’s yet another “genius racket” character.

They try to foist him off on us as some average, likable bloke, one of us. But he is an industry, not just some slob, not with assets more than some large companies. This is sort of a routine part of their promotional efforts, though. Other entertainment fields make industries out of, for example, actors and singers as well, and sell them to us as “jes’ plain folk.”

Meantime, there are the tales about King being so smart, well-read, and intelligent.

He’s got time to run a radio station, research and write, do promotions, do interviews and seminars, act, attend awards, watch baseball and other sports, play in a band, direct movies, be a blogger, husband and father, be a drunken addict, get run over, do screenplays/adapt his books for the screen, review books and movies, fight court battles, write letters to the editor and do his activism? Does he also feed the hungry and build ships in bottles in his spare time while helping down at the dog pound? Oh, and television producer, I see, as well. Oh and run a charity and narrate 1300+ audio books. He’s literally a “constant reader,” and “constant listener,” too, because Kathi Kamen Goldmark, who founded the Rock Bottom Remainders, the authors-only rock band that includes Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, Dave Barry and, on rhythm guitar, King, says, “You can’t mention a book he hasn’t read, you can’t mention an obscure musician who he can’t sing a lyric of one of his songs.”

There’s a consistent flaw in all of these Genius Racket stories: they go too far, and attribute their “geniuses” with superhuman abilities. Well, there is no human with superhuman abilities. And, you often also get a combination of the outright bizarre, the impossible and unlikely, contradictions, logical inconsistencies, and a general air of deception that wafts through all the stuff they concoct.

King’s Failing Memory

He’s credited with 100+! books, short stories, essays and articles, and yet claims no memory of writing some of them. Impossible. Writing a novel is far too time-consuming to “forget about,” as if it were the wisp of a song lyric or a brief interlude watching fish in the pond while passing through the park.

He doesn’t remember writing Cujo. Then it’s Cujo and The Tommyknockers he doesn’t remember, in another reference. Then it’s Cujo, Tommyknockers, and others! WTF?

Funny how this ruse is very convenient. If they ask him something about the particulars of a book, oh, he “doesn’t remember.” He was in an alcoholic haze, or he was injured, or he was on meds.

He says he saw a friend hit and killed by a train — but has no recollection of it. Where’s my WTF? button? If he has no recollection of it, how does he remember that he saw a friend hit and killed by a train? Yep... he sure has a problem with recollecting... everything! Who writes this stuff? Not King, he’s a better writer than that.

Tragic Childhood

To compound the nuttiness, there is no actual, “Stephen E. King.”

His dad “went out for a pack of cigarettes,” and never came back. Isn’t that a cliche?

We do know, though, that it is routine to make up stories for built-up “celebrities,” about having a tough early life, to garner sympathy and attention.

They also like to throw in stuff about “overcoming obstacles.” The nonsense they come up with. For example, why would King have trouble finding a publisher for Salem’s Lot, as the media reports, when he had just gotten $400,000 for the paperback rights to Carrie?

His father was Donald Edwin Pollock. “Between the ages of 18 and 23, Donald changed his surname to King. No record has been found to verify a legal name change.” So, “King” is only an alias, then. If there’s no record, there’s no official name change, since, all a name change is, is a change in the government records, necessarily public.

Why is his father such a mystery? Odd that he’s not come out of the woodwork to try to ride the coattails of his son’s fame.

Family Ties

King (Pollock) is related to Pillsbury. So... child of privilege?

Yes, it is that Pillsbury. He’s the 6th cousin 2 times removed to Charles A. Pillsbury (Co-Founder of C.A. Pillsbury Co. the giant industrial food concern).

They don’t mention, and never did mention, oddly, these little details: a Pillsbury, and, through his mother’s side, related to Amy Poehler, of S.N.L. and Parks & Recreation, and to Robert Frost, the poet, of all people! Now why didn’t this come up in conversations and interviews? This would be precisely the type of thing you’d want to discuss if you were interviewing the man, great human-interest stuff.

Stranger and Stranger

Producer Dino De Laurentiis, just let no experience King direct Maximum Overdrive, now they’re (including King himself) trying to gaslight you that it was a bad movie. The peculiar thing here: it wasn’t. Well, yes, it was bad, but exactly, exactly as bad as any number of those goofy B horror movies. (Indicating that King was experienced, or others were involved that should be credited with the direction, which is, of course, very likely, and they simply used King’s name to attract attention and publicity, another deception.) Well, it is reported that De Laurentiis would review the dailies (the sample footage filmed the previous day), and call for certain changes, so right there, it shows that De Laurentiis was involved in the direction.

There’s big bucks involved in making those movies (even the crappy ones), you don’t just throw them to some neophyte like throwing a dog a bone. Hell, whatever the budget, whenever money is involved, even small amounts, there are people lurking around to ensure it’s spent well, and a movie is an investment. They weren’t making a film just for King to have his little lark.

Especially if, by 8:30 AM, this cokehead is on his 10th beer, according to on-set translator Roberto Croci, and he’s drunk all day, drinking until late. Was King still writing his ten pages a day then, as well?

Jes’ Sayin’

Why do King stories get crap adaptations for film? That’s one of the biggest mysteries of all. The adaptations could be blockbuster movies if handled with care. We only need look at Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, to see how far a quality treatment can carry them. Yet they treat most movie adaptations of his books like garbage. Like they’re just pumped out on an assembly line basis. They don’t really value the source, despite its quality. What they did to The Gunslinger was a travesty.

King, then, has been reduced to just a tool. Used, exploited, as if he were a joke, based on the way they treat his work. The Gunslinger/Dark Tower series could easily rival Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Doesn’t King have an agent who can insist on proper treatments of his work? Why are they leaving money on the table?

But what about King’s plagiarism? Sure enough, there’s plenty of that. Consider the story about a game show where unarmed contestants run for their lives against armed hunters who are trying to kill them, winning a two hundred thousand dollar prize if they manage to stay alive. Sounds like King’s The Running Man, which borrows from 1984 and Robert Heinlein’s work. But, really, The Running Man is simply an expanded and revised version of The Prize of Peril, by R. Sheckley (1958).

It is important to note, however, having just read The Prize of Peril, we can report that it’s alright, for what it is, and fortunately very short, but it’s no, The Running Man. The stunning difference, is the polish of King’s work in comparison to Sheckley’s, the sense of place, and reality. Verisimilitude, and don’t think I could spell that on my own. Of course Sheckley was writing for some pulp magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, at a penny a word or so in those days, so there’s little time for soul-searching and reflection!

Nevertheless, it’s the same concept, and fundamentally the same story and characters.

(Was that why they did such a faithless movie adaptation of The Running Man, to avoid having to pay Sheckley royalties? Seems a strong possibility.)

It is a most troublesome point that, in this instance, King was defended by Harlan Ellison, the hack and sue-happy weasel who was constantly filing nuisance suits based on claims of copyright infringements on his writing (that somehow worked in his favor, very lucratively). Unbelievably, he claimed that his story for The Outer Limits episode, “Soldier,” was ripped off to make The Terminator, and he had the nerve to sue over it. Uh, hell no, it’s absolutely nothing like The Terminator, a point that Ellison himself actually admits! (He bases his claim on the first few seconds at the beginning of the film, that he says is “exactly alike” (it’s not).

Amusingly this shameless liar, was quoted as saying he feared that there would be similarities and was shocked and horrified to see there were. What an intolerable troll.

Ellison suing over Terminator is like Captain Crunch suing over Pirates of the Caribbean. A nuisance suit, as Cameron, writer and director of The Terminator, complained. There was no plagiarism. It’s Ellison who should have been sued, for being a dipshit.

It’s mind-blowing then, what happened when poor old Sheckley, who knew Ellison, contacted him for advice.

Shockley went to Ellison, when The Running Man came to Shockley’s attention.

Ellison, famous for his lawfare, admitted that it was obvious that King’s story was a revision of Sheckley’s story... then consoled Sheckley that King probably didn’t mean it!

Anyway, Sheckley reportedly then went to King, who “explained his method of story creation” to Sheckley. WTF? It doesn’t matter his “quirks” and “technique,” just that he wholesale appropriated the story with his own “spin.” He can try to explain it away, but he still owes Sheckley some royalties regardless of how smooth a talker he is. But Sheckley was... What? Scared off? Is all this the grift of some organized crime racket?

Makes you wonder just how accurate the guy from Lennon Murder Truth is. One of the favorite gambits of Intel is to create a crazy person to tell you the truth, so that you will dismiss it as crazy. But not just that. It's also to make it seem that anyone who is suspicious of someone or something is reading too many “crazy conspiracy loons.” So look at this amusing little tidbit:

“Jail King’s Sick Ass”

Excerpt from lennonmurdertruth.com, typos retained:

Stephen King is a murderer. He shot John Lennon in the back, like the cowardhe i s, and stole a musical/political genius from all of you. He ruined your world, deliberately, and now you are living in the nightmare he has created for you. Now, until you put him in jail where he belongs, all of of you are, really, just his cowards.

Now, people of America, people of New York, who never even put Chapman on trial in the first place, find a spine and expose him. Or are you King’s sick cowards? Many of you are, you know. “Sympathy for the devil.” You can still get well, people. I believe that most of you are just temporarilly sick and weak and media controlled and that once you get informed you WILL JAIL KING’S SICK ASS and punish him for what he did to you and the future and the world.

King was stalking Bruce Stringsteen in 1992; engaging in back stage parties, stage rehearsals etc. until I got on New York’s biggest radio talk show and warned Springsteen’s friends that King was likely planning to murder him, too. What are the chances that the van “accident” and subsequent death of the driver happened as you were told? I say only ten per cent. What are the chances that King had the driver killed with or without help? I say 30 per cent.

He’s like the guy who, after he is arrested for murdering ten people, his neighbors all say; “But he was such a nice man. I just can’t believe it.” King is a sociopath who shot Lennon to get back at all of you for teasing him as a child and because he wanted to kill his father for walking out on him when he was two.

Weird, that part about Springsteen, because it’s said that King originally wanted Bruce Springsteen to play the role of Bill Robinson in Maximum Overdrive!

From another article on the same site, verbatim:

You’er all standing under Stephen King’s urine stream. See? Our enemies laugh at your foolishness.” Airheads, sellouts, sports fixated, money chasing, t.v. controlled, selfish, blind..”

I can already PROVE that Nixon and Reagan arranged to have Stephen King murder John Lennon, as exposed in Time and Newsweek and U.S. News magazine’s crypto codes in the headlines found only in the weeks surrounding the crime. That’s all fact, not theory.

Murderer, Stephen King MUST BE JAILED FOR LIFE OR YOU”RE ALL SCREWED!!!!!! For three decades he has enjoyed ruling over all of you, urinating all over you and, yes, laughing at all “you blind, obsessive fools” He degraded your lives by at least 25 percent but you don’t care!

Roland

The main character of King’s Dark Tower series is a “gunslinger.”

And that’s all he does, the only way he solves his problems is with his revolvers.

“Boom-boom-boom, the guns spoke in his hand,” and away go all his woes.

So how could a guy that hates guns write a story where the hero’s six-guns solve all his problems? Roland thinks the unarmed passengers on an airplane flight are all feebs. “What sort of sheep are these?” Roland marvels. How can this King/Pollock be anti-gun? Partly more liberal hypocrisy, but, of course, he has been noticeably unhinged and stupid since that accident when the van knocked him across three counties. Is it possible he’s dead and they’re using a double to propagandize, and sell more stuff, as they will do, without hesitation?

The Accident

Reportedly, King was struck while walking on the side of the highway by a van driven by some distracted halfwit — who later turned up dead!

New York Post

DRIVER WHO HIT STEPHEN KING FOUND DEAD AT TRAILER HOME

By Social Links for Jessica Graham

Published Sep. 24, 2000

The driver who ran down Stephen King and left the horror author gravely injured has been found dead. Police discovered the body of Bryan Edwin Smith, 43, in his bed Friday evening. Cops were called to Smith’s mobile home in Fryeburg, Maine, by his brother, who had not heard from him in three days...

In January, Smith pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor driving-to-endanger charge in a deal that included a six-month jail sentence and a driver’s license suspension.

What the bugger-lovin’ hell is that about? Misdemeanor? And somebody’s lying even about the court deal, because another report says he never went to prison or lost his license. But then he turns up mysteriously dead 15 months after hitting King? And they blithely claim natural causes!

Telling that his initials are “BS,” and weird that he has the same middle name as King.

King’s an extremely wealthy man — yet he goes strolling on the dangerous side of the road, wandering aimlessly about, courting danger, to get plowed down by a van. And the van has a mysterious driver that turns out to be as intriguing as the attempted assassin in Hinkley/Reagan. The story would be at home as the plot of one of his books.

Yet King is always talking about his paranoia — he’s afraid of most everything. Which is to say, it’s highly unlikely he’d wander the wrong sides of busy highways after writing a book — Pet Sematary — about the deadly perils of highway traffic.

No one with a half billion dollars gets steamrolled by a corrupt county sheriff protecting his brother, which is what supposedly happened in this case. (In fact, the official story subtly implies that nothing changed in King’s life since he accrued half a billion dollars.)

Understand, you aren’t just you anymore with those assets. Suddenly everyone wants a piece and many people are mixed up in your business. Insurers and your publisher don’t want you out becoming road kill in a pissant burg on some smelly little highway. Or do they? They say they sell more books after the author’s death, who the bugger knows what they scheme up?

If the story is true, King’s a louse for his feeble reaction to the non-punishment of Smith. With his resources, he could ensure Smith wouldn’t be out on the roads terrorizing other people, as he had been doing even before the King incident.

Yeah, King went off the rails some time back. Maybe it was the accident. You don’t alienate your audience by calling someone who disagrees with you on Climate Change, an “idiot.”

You don’t say you write for your “Constant Reader,” then turn around and say your new book, Holly, “will probably piss off a lot of people.”

Not really like the King we’ve come to know.

Warren Silver, the Kings’ Lawyer in Bangor

Silver had gone to western Maine shortly after the accident to investigate it and meet with Smith. He came home with an idea that he prayed Smith hadn’t had: the 1985 blue Dodge Caravan, fresh with King’s dents, might fetch a frighteningly high price on eBay. The next day, Silver called Smith, offered him $1,500 for the van and had it shipped back to Bangor.

“King’s lawyer and two others purchased Smith’s van for $1,500, reportedly to prevent it from appearing on eBay.” What kind of a sick bastich’s first order of business is something like that? Who has time for such trivia, particularly when he’s got a hell of a lot of other work to do in this case. He needed “two others?” To cough up only $1500? Whose name did they register it in, then?

The story is moronic. So what if the guy might get a “frighteningly high price?” And it obviously wasn’t even true, unless you think $1500 is “frightening.” More likely, the ghoul lawyer saw an easy opportunity for a quick buck for himself. The only “frightening” thing he saw was if someone else cashed in big-time instead of him!

Then the story changes, and supposedly King bought it to hit with a sledge. So he’s more stunned even than we thought, because the van is an inanimate object that was misused, so “hitting it” would just be dopey, and everyone but King himself seems to know that.

Perhaps the real King did die that day, and they concocted those batshit stories as cover. What lawyer goes running out to do the leg work? There are investigators to do that.

There’s another horror-writing Stephen King, Stephen L. King (“What are the odds?”), though his stories are outrageously cheesy hackery. On the other hand, it’s pretty funny legit satirical take on Stephen E. King, and some people actually like it based on Amazon reviews. So, good for him.

It looks like they’ve recently “non-personed” him though, as he’s hard to find on Amazon or even via search! Just a short while ago, he was all over the place. Did King pee on and kill him too?

Not to be outdone in redundancy, there’s yet another writer, Stephen H. King, but he calls himself, “The Other Stephen King” on his blog. He better watch his back, and carry a pee umbrella.

Trick to Writing Your Own Book

Rowling had written the first four (Harry Potter) books in a blisteringly fast five years.

But King gets a pass while releasing something, be it novel, collection, screenplay or what have you in ’74, ’75 and every year since 1977, often multiple publications a year, despite all his travails. If Rowling is blisteringly fast, King is Speedy Gonzales and the Road Runner on amphetamines.

If, and only if, you wanted to make your own industry out of “Stephen King,” if you weren’t completely ethical, it could play out where most of the work is done by copy writers, then someone talented, like King himself, might edit to give all the books credited to him, “that Stephen King feel.” Also, someone like King, a huge success, will have slew of imitators. You might buy or steal the ideas from their stories, then again, edit for that final polish, and release them under King’s name.

Point is, if they aren’t doing it with King, they’re pulling this trick with someone else. It’s too good to pass up.

In fact, it could be said that you’d be a damn fool not to do it, when otherwise you’d have depend on the vagaries and whims (and progressively higher pay) of your star writers. They build an industry out of an author when and where they can, because that’s their business, not farting around with things no one will buy.

Which would make, “King” just an organization, another business, and “Stephen King” just the name they’ve given to a publishing empire. There’s no reason they couldn’t get a score of writers to imitate King’s style, then start churning it out.

In fact, that is very close to what King himself admitted to doing. By his own recollection, as a kid he would sit for hours, robotically, almost maniacally, copying stories out of books, rewriting them to give them his own spin and tailor them to his taste! That’s his strength.

Certainly the his copying of the Sheckley story is more than enough proof that he’s continued this habit, and it explains the fact of King taking up a different name (The Running Man was originally published under the “Richard Bachman” pseudonym). Nothing really wrong with using ideas, since, as is commonly known, you can’t protect an idea or concept by patent or copyright. You can make your own revision, a similar story, even if it uses general concepts from another story. But it should be significantly different. As to when the new gets too close to the old, well, that’s what keeps the lawyers busy.

Carrie

His wife fished the pages out of the garbage can and encouraged him to finish the story, saying that she would help him with the female perspective; he followed her advice and expanded it into a novel. King said, “I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas... my considered opinion was that I had written the world’s all-time loser.”

So, he “had no better ideas,” yet somehow, subsequently, he’s never run out of ideas, which is consistent with them feeding him ideas.

In King’s case, almost the whole family is in on this thing, with the unlikely coincidence that, of he and his immediate family, four (or five) of five are writers. Build a dynasty, why not? Do talents like writing pass down through the generations? More sensible an explanation is that they’re going to milk and exploit the King name as thoroughly as possible.

Class Act

Harding Hudson on the New York Post website comment section, November 1, 2022

My daughter worked at Fenway Park years ago selling hot dogs. King paid the tab with pennies and then laughed. Class act.

Rowling

Saying Harry Potter is any good is borderline daft.

There’s a claim floating around that Rowling did not write the Harry Potter books, she’s an actress! The books were actually done, by committee! An “op” to create a series that they could promote the hell out of (and it isn’t very good at all, just a cheesy children’s fantasy series that’s oversold to an unprecedented degree).

“The thirteenth publisher accepted Potter.” It’s quite probable that these publishers don’t “accept” anyone. They’re another con to make the average slob think he can “be somebody.” The only time they’ll actually publish a new writer is:

• if it’s part of a con, like that just-mentioned committee that produces books, deliberately to make a sort of “empire,” including movie rights, merch., and all the rest
• if it’s someone already famous
• indirectly, by stealing the idea from someone, then getting a house writer to write their own version
• if by some fluke the author has already sold a crap-ton through another venture, like self-publishing
• if the author serves an agenda.

Remember this law, we’ve discussed it often before: As soon as you use a single significant lie to promote a person, idea or agenda, that thing is immediately discredited. “Significant lie,” because we’re not talking about exaggeration or hyperbole in advertising.

With the Harry Potter series, it has been observed that no book ever written had been promoted on these levels, let alone a children’s book. However, this scheme was just part of an onslaught, with other, similar frenzies also in play around the same time, like The Da Vinci Code, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and The Hunger Games. Of course there was also another stand-out: The Secret, this in the non-fiction category, that got international hype.

She “conjured up the idea for Potter on a train,” we’re told. Figured out all the details on a four-hour train ride, they say. (But then took years to finally complete the first book.) Well, what inspired that? Was she always obsessed with boy-wizards? Wouldn’t a woman write a girl-wizard? Of course. Look at King’s struggles with Carrie, where he got his wife to handle the “girl stuff.”

You have to learn how to write a novel, as for anything. You cannot just “sit down and write a novel,” and in general, you have to have been writing and reading all your life to produce something competent. What about all the rest of the books? More long train rides?

“Coincidentally, I didn’t have a pen and was too shy to ask anyone for one on the train, which frustrated me at the time, but when I look back it was the best thing for me. It gave me the full four hours on the train to think up all the ideas for the book.” Now take a good look at the author, outspoken and all over the place doing her promotional work. Does she strike you as a shy, shrinking wallflower too timid to scrounge up a pen or pencil?

Stephen King — Stephen Pollock, rather — is not the only one with a suspect back story.

That’s yet another thing that no real writer would say. You don’t just develop a whole novel in four hours. And she’s always scribbling down ideas and notes for her books — but she doesn’t carry a pen! What a load! It’s irritating to put up with this claptrap, which doesn’t appreciate that it’s massively time-consuming to write a story, as we’ve mentioned. All the details aren’t just revealed in a flash of inspiration. It can take considerable effort just to figure out a paragraph.

Even “discovery writers,” who go where the story leads them, have to plan a general direction for the story.

BTW, they’re calling figurehead Rowling a “transphobe” now. Like her or not, what happened to being entitled to your opinion? This is almost certainly a publicity stunt, giving new attention to the series. Most authors are told to keep their political and social opinions to themselves, as most all show business people do, except the deliberate provocateurs. Now, of course this does not apply to the fakes that are created with the intent of pushing an agenda. With this trans stuff, it has the effect of once more drawing attention to something that most people just want to ignore and forget about.

There’s plenty of precedent for manufactured authors.

Look at “Nancy Drew” author Carolyn Keene, for example. Just kidding, you can’t look at her — she doesn’t exist. “Carolyn Keene” is merely the name used by many writers over the course of many years to create the Nancy Drew series.

— ClaireLinic on medium.com

The same thing was done with the Hardy Boys mysteries.

The movie, Barton Fink used a plot point of a fictionalized William Faulkner, part of a stable of writers his employer, a movie studio, used — while his girlfriend/muse wrote much of his stuff, secretly, which apparently was a real thing.

Verral wrote all six of his “Brains Benton” novels, but the last five were credited to another writer. Verral had to rewrite when he didn’t like how those five came out, but didn’t get author’s credit.

This isn’t all accomplished under cover of darkness, in fact, they’re often very open about the process of “ghost writing,” or “collaboration.” Like with Shatner and all his “TekWar” novels. Per Wikipedia:

TekWar is a series of science fiction novels created by Canadian actor William Shatner, ghost-written by American writer Ron Goulart...

“Rowling,” of course, gets the usual build-up/Superman billing, using all the tropes and heart-tugging BS. Someone commented on this:

Just like the Nancy Drew series. She also, isn’t and never has been poor. She comes from a crap ton of money. The six month poor thing was a publicity stunt made to sell the rags to riches story.

— LucaNoire on YouTube

Now she’s supposedly the first billionaire author — and a woman, to boot. Let’s try to retain our senses here. As Joan Rivers would say, everybody just calm down. First off, no one is just giving some ditzy biddy a billion dollars. People need to get it through their heads that someone would have had to give her a billion dollars, which is, even today, a fair bit of scratch, and no one wants to do that.

If they thought they had a hot property, they’d buy the series rights off her, long before any real wealth started flowing, or after they saw it was catching on. And they’d low-ball her. “A children’s book. It’s not very good at all... Well, you might make $1,000, off this dud, less taxes and expenses... Or, we could give you a $100,000 lump sum, but only if you sign over all the rights, right now. And remember, most authors only make $500 or less on a book, and a kid’s book makes even less... so you’ll have only maybe a few hundred sales...”

They wouldn’t have to even do that. They’d just tell her the truth, “If you don’t take the deal, we won’t promote it. It won’t go anywhere. In fact, there’s no end of sorcery books much better than yours that flop. If you play ball, we’ll give you $100k, far more than most authors dream of getting, and you’ll become famous.”

We need to try to see reality as it is, not as hopeful fantasies would have us think.

Sequels & Rewrites & Recycling and “Borrowing”

This is done all the time in the industry. For instance, Jim Shooter, as a teen, wrote for the D.C. Comics publication, Adventure Comics (featuring Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes) in the 1960s (actually rescuing that title, though I don’t remember them ever letting on that their main writer was just a teen), and he recounted how they told him to write a version of the 1924 short story, The Most Dangerous Game, for the comic.

Battle Royale

Considering the similarities between Battle Royale and The Hunger Games Commenter “Phil,” quoted on Narkive Newsgroup Archive is insightful.

The main story is essentially the same, it uncanny and the underlying similarities with Battle Royale shows this method was used. You just don’t get a story follow that closely to another story by chance. The tosh about it being similar to Gladiator, The Running Man, Greek mythology, etc is all just a smoke screen to distract from the real source Battle Royale. Its an often successful formula to follow, take a book that had a certain success level systematically create a version, edit out stuff that didnt work well, make it as relevant to today’s society/age group that can relate and your book then stands a good chance of being at least successful if not more so, as if the original had a certain success level then your insuring yours will as well.

Some “Secret”

The Secret is merely a ripoff of Napoleon Hill’s stuff. With more than 35 million copies sold world-wide, it is said to be a repackaging of Think and Grow Rich, which fell out of copyright.

Special Editions & Collectibles

The Hillary Newsweek cover is a good example of a kind of a sneaky little money-maker, as mentioned in Smarter Than They Look. That is, they printed it, not to be prepared if Hillary did win, but to have novelty items to flog as “Collectibles,” to make some bucks.

The Stench of the “Scholarly Press”

The Conceptual Penis

So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.

We find gems like this in the original article:

2.2. Climate change and the conceptual penis

Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis. Our planet is rapidly approaching the much-warned-about 2°C climate change threshold, and due to patriarchal power dynamics that maintain present capitalist structures, especially with regard to the fossil fuel industry, the connection between hypermasculine dominance of scientific, political, and economic discourses and the irreparable damage to our ecosystem is made clear.

Philosopher Peter Boghossian, and collaborator James Lindsay released this under pseudonyms. They explained the hoax in a paper called “‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’: A Sokal-style Hoax on Gender Studies.”

This site has already exposed how fake science and research is peddled endlessly, in fact, most of modern science appears to be fake.

In Conclusion

Publishers aren’t sitting in a vacuum, waiting for something good to turn up on their doorstep. They’re proactive, as we saw with “Caroline Keene.”

Is it ethical? Is it legal? Does it matter? How does it affect us?

Hopefully they aren’t selling something labeled “Stephen King” to us under false pretenses. It would be similar to buying a Corolla and getting one made somewhere other than Japan. The quality varies — for the worse. If you like the writing of the man who wrote, “The Stand,” and “The Gunslinger,” a usurper will be “off,” but you’ll probably just go, “Oh, he wrote a stinker that time.” Or maybe even, “That’s not the same as the usual King stuff.” Maybe you’ll like it, but it is also more likely to be a waste of your time. But whatever the case, it would be unjustly enriching some deceptive swine, a sort of theft like getting regular coffee or milk when you pay for “organic.”

Well, people always talk about seeking “enlightenment,” so there’s a little bit of it for today. If you weren’t aware of the scam, it’s eye-opening. Publishing might seem like some noble endeavor, but actually it is not. And it harvests the ideas, energy and hopes of would-be authors, another way of turning people into those human batteries referenced in The Matrix. It’s always good to know about potential scams. Just as how, even if you aren’t going to buy a car, it’s valuable to know salesmen’s tricks.

Last minute find: This article exposes that the New York/Poo Dork Times prints a fraudulent bestseller list: "Remarkably Lopsided": NYT Bestseller Bias Laid Bare. Why they aren’t sued for this stuff is a mystery.

So there you have it, proof that it’s all fake, and of course the book publishers are in collusion with the newspaper publishers.

The “King Con,” seems to be bigger than any one author, in fact, it’s the entire publishing industry, which comes off as yet another racket.

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